The Serpent's Shadow

Chapter Nine

PETER Scott had never been a teacher before, but Maya Witherspoon was such an eager learner that any defects in his teaching were inconsequential. “The main thing is that all of these names and conventions we use are only that, and no more: conventions,” Peter pointed out, doing his best to keep from being distracted by the doctor’s intense gaze and proximity. The way she concentrated on him reminded him strongly of the owl on the branch just overhead. She didn’t look away for a second, and her gaze, while not threatening, was not in the least mild. He’d seen that look before—most notably on Almsley’s face—and it meant that nothing was going to distract that person from whatever his or her goal was.

He struggled for a moment with an analogy, and finally the conservatory in which they sat gave him one. “Magic is—oh—like sunlight; it’s everywhere, even moonlight is reflected sunlight, after all. We just deal with it inside of a structure we understand—and in the case of the Elemental Masters, the structure is mostly Greek, some Egyptian, and a bit of all the old pagans that ever roamed Europe.”

Did she smile? It was hard to tell if there had been a faint smile on her lips, or if the subtly shifting lamplight had put the fleeting expression there. “We are a bit like that in India, too,” she murmured. “A little borrowed from this, a minor god of the crossroads added there—the hand of Buddha, the touch of Mohammed—and who knows? Perhaps even the words of Christian teachers who came even before Constantine ruled. We are great borrowers.”

Her voice soothed his nerves, for they were certainly playing him up in her presence, and he went on, encouraged. “The thing is, that over time—centuries!—that structure’s taken on a life of its own, just as yours has, I suppose. Magic’s also like metal; heat it and pour it into a mold, or sculpt it like wax, and it’s going to keep that shape. So here, in the West, we have Water, Earth, Fire, and Air Magic, and the corresponding Elemental Creatures to serve our uses—that’s the structure, the mold that we pour the magic into to give it shape, and what we use to shape the magic to our own ends.”

“I wish I had the benefit of a structure,” she said wistfully, for a moment just speaking her thoughts aloud. “I have never learned the structure of the magic of home. I have been groping in the darkness, like the blind men with their elephant. I have bits, but no grasp of the whole.” Maya did not pause long for any self-pity, but drove back to the subject at hand. “But why do you have this shape and no other? How is it that you actually have creatures of the Elements to command?” she asked.

Here he was on solid ground, and felt comfortable providing an explanation. “It’s my theory that we can blame the Greeks, since they were the first old fellows to have much of a written tradition. It’s easier to preserve a way of thinking if it’s written down, you see. It’s easier to have a structure and build on it if you’ve got it written and less subject to change.”

“I do see,” Maya said, nodding, oblivious to the soft strands of hair that had escaped from her chignon and curled charmingly around her face. Peter tried to remain oblivious too, but with less success.

“I think that’s the entire reason for why our magic works this way,” Peter continued. “I think we’ve got the Elementals because we’ve believed in ‘em for so long, but there are those who say the Elementals came first.”

“There is probably no way to tell now,” Maya replied, tapping one finger thoughtfully on the arm of her chair. “And except for a scholar, who cares only for hunting down the roots of things, I cannot see that it matters.” She shrugged. “It is. So I must and will work with it. If my patient has a wound, it is my duty to treat and heal it, not wonder about how he got it.”

“It matters to the insatiably curious,” Peter amended, thinking with amusement of Almsley. “I can think of a couple of my colleagues who’ll want to stir about in your recollections and try and pick out the differences between Western magic and Eastern.”

She made a dismissive gesture. “They will have to wait until we—I—have more leisure. You say that I have the magic of Earth? How did you know? And what, then, is yours?”

“I knew because of affinities,” he responded. “That is—how my magic responded to yours. I’m Water; Water nourishes Earth, or washes it away, and I saw that in the colors, in the sense of your magic. You do know that magic has colors?”

“Oh, yes!” she responded. “My mother’s was like mine, all warm golds and yellow-browns; it tastes of cinnamon and saffron, and feels like velvet warmed in front of a fire.”

She tastes and feels her magic? Good Lord—she’s stronger in it than I thought!

“Well, mine’s greens and turquoise, and it tastes of exactly what you’d expect—water. Every kind of water there is, depending on where I am and what I’m doing,” he told her. “It feels like water, too—in every way that water can be felt, especially things like currents. If I’d been Fire, I’d see and feel things about Fire that are just as subtle. I’d also have recognized that you were Earth, and have known—just in the way that you can recognize the familiar accent of someone from India speaking English when you hear it—that Earth can support Fire, or smother it. Now, Earth and Air have no affinity at all, and if I’d been Air, I would have felt that as well—a lack of anything connecting us. Earth and Air are the complete opposites; so are Fire and Water.”

“I should think more so—with Fire and Water,” Maya said, weighing her words. “Wouldn’t they be enemies?”

She picked up that quickly enough. “Ye-es, sometimes. Mind you, any mage who’s gone over to the Black Lodges can be the enemy of any mage of the White. But, well, it’s prudent on the part of a Fire Master to be circumspect with a Master of Water. In a duel of equals, should it come to that, Water almost always has the advantage.” Which might account for the way that Alderscroft treats me. “By the same logic, though, Air and Fire are natural allies, and work very well together.”

“And so are Earth and Water.” She tilted her head to one side, and added dryly, “How fortunate for me.”

“So are Earth and Earth!” he said hastily. “The only reason I haven’t turned you over to an Earth Master for training is that there aren’t any in London. They don’t like cities, as a rule. I don’t think you’ve got the time to trot out to Surrey two or three times a week or more—that’s where the nearest one I know of is—and I couldn’t get Mrs. Phyllis into London with a team of horses dragging her here. Peter Almsley’s got another in his family—a cousin—but that’s even farther out, and Cousin Reuben won’t ever leave his gardens or his flock. He’s a vicar, you see.”

“I can’t say that I blame him,” Maya replied, with a hint of a wistful note. “No, I can’t leave my patients any more than he can leave his charges. Not at the moment, anyway. If I’m to go haring off into the countryside, I’ll have to find another physician to take some of my days at the Fleet, and that won’t be easy. Not a full physician, anyway, not even another female physician; they all have their own concerns.” Once again, she was thinking aloud, and he was secretly pleased that she had sufficient trust in him to relax enough to do so. “I might be able to get those who want surgery practice, though, so they can be certified… if I offer to pay them for other work on condition they act as surgeons for gratis.” Making her own calculations, she didn’t need any opinions from him, and Peter held his tongue. “It can wait, though—you said as much. You can teach me for now, without my trying to find substitutes.”

He nodded. “It’s the affinities—Water can serve as an initial teacher to Earth easily enough, just as Fire can to Air. And vice versa, of course.”

“Of course,” she echoed, her eyes reflecting that her mind was already elsewhere. “Is that why you became a man of the sea? That you were already a Water Master?”

Oh, he liked the quick way she picked up on things! “I wasn’t a Master at the time, but yes.” He nodded. “I went straight off to the first ship that felt right, and applied as a cabin boy when I was eleven. Would it surprise you to learn that the captain of that ship was a Water Master?”

She looked amused. “Not very, no.”

He made a gesture with his upturned hand. “There you have it. If we have the choice, mages tend to pick occupations that reflect their magic, and if they aren’t singled out by a Master of their own element, they go looking for one. Earth—well, you get some trades that are obvious, farmers, herdsmen, herbalists, gamekeepers, gardeners—but there are also a fair lot of mid-wives, animal handlers, and trainers, and although you’re the first physician I know of, there’re clergymen, a lawyer or two, and the odd squire here and there. Water’s almost always a sailor or fisherman, a riverman, a canal worker, but I know of a couple of artistic types, another lawyer and an architect and several fellows who work in the city and never have anything to do with sailing. And Lord Peter, of course; he’s some sort of diplomat. Fire—metalsmiths, glass-workers, firefighters, but also soldiers, the odd lad in government service. Air, though, they tend to be the scholars, the artists, or the entertainers. Lots of creative types in Air.”

“But not always.”

“But not always,” he agreed. “Lord Peter Almsley’s Water and, as I mentioned, diplomat—I think. They’re always sending him off to the continent chasing this or that, anyway. He’s really creative in his own sphere; he’s certainly entertaining, and he’s as persuasive a speaker as any great actor. It isn’t his Element that gave him his purpose and job, it’s his glib tongue. It’s not just the magic, you see, it’s what situation in life you were born to, and your natural talents, which don’t necessarily march in time with your magic. And anyway, you never start with learning Elemental Magic.”

Her eyes grew puzzled. “Why not?”

“Because you either have to coax or coerce the Elementals to work for you, and that takes practice and working in the raw basics first. Not all Elementals are—nice.” He thought for a moment about some of the habits of his own affinity. “Some are vicious. If they heard your call, they might come to it, just so they could hurt you. If you weren’t strong enough to defend yourself, they would. Hurt you, that is.”

Maya’s lips formed a surprised “O” although she made no sound.

He decided at that point that both of them had enough of abstracts for the moment. “Just so you know. Forewarned and all that. Are you ready to try some of those basics?”

“I think so. Can we work here?” Her last words were hesitant, and he suspected that she had preserved a chamber here in the house where she worked her spells. He also suspected that it was an annex of her own bedchamber, and she hesitated to bring a man and a stranger so near to it. I am a stranger, he reminded himself. No matter that it seems less that way with every minute that passes. I’m lucky she lets me in here alone with her at all.

“We can,” he said, and was rewarded with a genuine smile of relief. “Of course we can. Especially since the first of your lessons will be in constructing protections between your household and whatever is—” he waved his hand in the general direction of the street, “—out there. The difference between what you’ve been doing until now and what I’ll show you is that we’ll be building those protections on a foundation based in your own Element.”

Oh, Peter, that made you sound like a right pompous ass! He winced. She didn’t notice, though; or at least, she was too polite to show that she had.

He rose: she did the same. “Would you feel more comfortable with some concrete symbols of what we’re doing, or not?” he asked diffidently. “I mean, would it help you if I actually drew chalk diagrams on the floor, or outlines, or whatever?”

“I think,” she said, with a flavoring of irony, “that we needn’t frighten the others with chalked diagrams. As a doctor, I have to imagine what is going on inside my patients, to lay them bare in my mind so that I can treat them.”

He flushed with acute embarrassment, and tried to cover it by getting to his feet. “Right—ah—well, if you were a real beginner, I’d have told you how to cleanse the area that you’re going to protect, but as it happens, it’s already cleansed. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be here.”

He pointed to the fountain where, attracted by a Master of their own element inside their domain, two undines drifted in the lower pool, forms visible as an occasional undulation of wave-into-arm or a transparent face briefly showing on the surface. Maya looked, and then looked again, staring.

“I never saw them before!” she exclaimed.

“They wouldn’t show themselves, not to you, without me being there; you aren’t their Element, and you aren’t a Master yet,” Peter replied, hoping that she didn’t think his automatic smile was patronizing. “The point is that they’re here, which means that the earth through which they had to go to get into your fountain is clean. By that, I don’t mean that it’s sterile or anything like that; I mean that there’s none of the usual city poisons in the water and earth here—you can’t help the ones in the air—and no poisonous energies here either.”

“But how—” she began.

“They probably got in here the last time it rained, following the runoff, or perhaps there’s a connection to an underground water supply on your property. There are lots of old wells and springs that have been forgotten.” Peter shrugged. “The point is that this kind of Elemental can’t move through anything that’s unclean.”

“But how did it become clean?” she asked, frowning. “I did nothing.”

Peter could only shrug again. I wish she’d stop asking questions I don’t know the answer to. I really don’t want to look like a right dunce in front of her. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But there are parts of the city that manage to stay clean no matter what. A lot of them are old shrines or even the sites of old churches that got built over. What’s been cleansed stays cleansed, unless someone comes along and deliberately deconsecrates it. Gods have a way of hanging onto what’s theirs, and of making where they live into a place where they can be—oh, I don’t know—I suppose the word is comfortable. And only a Dark god is comfortable in a place that’s contaminated.”

Maya opened her mouth, and Peter waited expectantly. Then she shut it again, abruptly. “Never mind,” she said. “Never mind.” He was faintly disappointed; he would have liked to hear her think out loud again, but plowed on regardless with the lesson.

“Well, you need to actually establish the boundaries of your clean area first,” he said, waving his hand at the wall around the greenhouse. “You said you can see Earth Magic—go ahead and see where it ends.”

She turned toward the back wall of the conservatory, dropped her gaze to the foot of the wall, and frowned. Then, slowly, understanding drifted over her features.

“If you hadn’t told me, I’d never have looked for it,” she said carefully, her eyes alight with satisfaction. “But there is, there is a boundary space right at that wall, and it isn’t the one I made! It’s where the earth in my garden stops, and something else that isn’t as—nice—starts.” Now it was her turn to grope after words.

“That edge is what you’re going to use, and not just a ‘fence’ of power either,” he told her. “Now that you see where I want you to put it, I want you to drain the power out of the existing barrier. Go on—” he urged, as she hesitated doubtfully. “I’ll have a shield of my own in place before you can drain yours away.” And he quickly made good on his word, putting up a shield to surround the entire house, cleverly using (or at least he thought he was being clever) the electrical wiring and the pipes to carry his protections. Things like copper wire and copper pipes carried magical currents as readily as they carried water or electricity.

Since he’d discovered that, Peter’d had a much easier time of casting shields.

Ah, but she must have discovered the same thing, for he sensed the flow of energies out even as his own poured in. Unmaking was always quicker and easier than making, if the thing you were tackling happened to be your own.

“Now we’ll go about this the correct way,” he told her, as the Earth power around the perimeter faded from his perception. He picked up a stone and placed it right at her feet. “We’ll be using that in a moment, but for now, look beyond the surface and read the energies under your garden. See how strong they are?”

She nodded slowly.

“Don’t just look at them. Touch them. Then when you’ve touched them, let them flow into you from the soles of your feet.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “You can do it; you already have, a little. You can’t help it.”

“If I relax…” she muttered, then took several slow, deep breaths. Meanwhile, he watched her like a cat at a mouse hole, waiting for the mouse to poke a whisker out. And after two false starts, he watched as the warm yellow-gold of Earth energy crept upward and engulfed her, leaving her haloed in light.

She laughed with delight and surprise. “My word! It’s like—like gulping down an entire bottle of champagne!” she exulted. He chuckled, recalling the first time that Water energies had flowed into him. It had been very like being drunk—the giddiness, the increased pulse rate—and yet he’d remained perfectly sober.

“Now concentrate on that rock,” he continued. Immediately, the little pebble glowed with an inner life, glowed with the power she had taken from the earth. He would have used a clear glass of water—glass being a kind of liquid, and so akin to water—if he needed a focus, which he really didn’t anymore. “Think of it as the world in miniature, and weave a single protection around it. Like this—”

He quickly shielded the rock with his own, Watery energies. These were the most basic, but basic did not mean “lesser.”

“Watch closely,” he warned, and slowly expanded the shields in all directions, exactly like blowing up a soap bubble. But unlike a soap bubble, this one remained just as tough and strong as it got bigger, for he kept pouring energy into it as it expanded. And when it met the shields he already had on the place, they merged immediately into a seamless whole.

“Now it’s your turn,” he told her. She bit her lip, and started as he had.

By Jove! She’s a fast learner! It only took a single false start, and her own shields began to expand from the point where they’d begun. The movement was painfully slow at first; she couldn’t expand and increase the energy going into the shield at the same time. No matter, that would come in time.

When her shields touched his, they did not merge. Instead, they layered, hers overlaying his. She looked nonplussed when that happened; she had probably thought that they would become a single entity.

“Is that right?” she asked, with a sharp look at him. “Are they supposed to do that?”

“Put earth and water in a jar and shake them together; no matter how hard you shake, the earth separates from the water once you stop agitating the jar,” he replied. “And that is how you build proper shields. Layer them, don’t try to braid them until you have more skill and practice. Bring them up on a central point, then expand them to meet your perimeter. Again?”

“Absolutely!” Now she seemed eager for the task; as Peter watched her establish her initial shield, he recognized it as the ‘I’m not here’ camouflage, and paid close attention to how she spun it up. When she expanded it—more smoothly this time, but by no means as quickly as he had—he was pleased to see it layer into the previous set. It was stronger now than it had been. That was part of being better integrated, but was also due to having more energy behind it.

“Feeling tired yet?” he asked her, once the shield was up and established. He knew she wouldn’t be, because she wasn’t using her own power, but it was time to call her attention to that fact.

“Why—no!” She was astonished by her own answer, and looked down at her hands with a quizzical expression, as if looking for the reason there.

“That’s because you used the energies of your Element, and not your own personal power,” he replied. “Now you don’t need to depend on yourself to work magic; you have a source of energy outside yourself. So think about that for a moment. What is that going to mean to you, and not just here and now, but outside these four walls?”

“That—Can I use this for healing as well?” she asked instantly. “Oh, of course I can! There’s no reason why I couldn’t, is there, and every reason why I should?”

Oh, well done! he applauded. “Exactly. Just make sure that you set up shields and cleanse the area first. This is another thing to remember, that other magicians and magical beings will see the flow of power and come to find out what’s going on, and some of them are not what you’d like to have hanging about you. But you can’t do that right now, all right? At this moment, right now, you need to practice all the different kinds of shields and protections you were trying to build weeks ago. When we’ve got something like what you were trying to produce, I will show you how to link the shields into the Earth energy so that the shields will maintain themselves, and that will be enough for one day.”

She blinked, and was lost within herself for a moment. “Ah. I am using my own power to control the Earth Magic, am I not?” she asked.

“Exactly so.” Brilliant! I’ll have to ask Almsley, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone picking up on the Art so quickly! He smiled. “Now, are you ready to learn about the kinds of shields that I know of?”

The hour that Maya had allotted to herself for this lesson simply flew past, and she decided to go a little short of sleep rather than cut the lesson short. When Peter Scott finally left, she was tired, but not with the bone-deep weariness that she often felt after establishing her guardian borders, and now she wouldn’t have to go over and over her protections every night. Now they would take care of themselves—unless someone tried to break them. Then she would have to make repairs, of course.

But not out of my own storehouse. She made the rounds of the oil-lamps and candles in the garden, making certain that they were all extinguished.

She had sensed the presence of strange life hiding within the bounds of her sanctuary—nothing inimical, in fact, she got a feeling of comfort and warmth from them, even though they wouldn’t show themselves. There was definitely something alive here, and she wondered, given the little she knew, what it could be. Little forest gods? It could be. The garden in the conservatory had taken on the sense of being a vaster space than it truly was.

Perhaps I’ll stumble across a faun lurking behind the vines some time soon.

She felt as excited as she had after her first successful surgery, as enthralled by the sense of power, of the things she could do with her own two hands.

“It is a start, and a good one, little chela.”

A familiar voice, but not human.

She looked up and saw Nisha’s glowing eyes gazing down at her. The owl had turned as white as bleached linen. The huge yellow eyes held her, as mesmerized as if she were a little mouse and Nisha contemplating her as a light snack.

It is not wise to tempt the gods, even (or especially?) if they are not yours, she thought, with a sudden chill.

“It is a start,” she agreed, as her heart gave an unpleasant jump. “I hope it is the right path.”

“It is, and because it is, your enemy will strew it with difficulties,” Nisha replied somberly. “Be wary, for they will not always come in a form you will recognize. Your enemy can do you much harm without needing to know where you are.”

The owl blinked once, then swiveled her head away, looking up and out into the darkness beyond the glazed roof. Freed from those eyes, Maya could move; she stepped back a pace and took a deep breath.

Nisha swiveled her head and caught her again. “She is here. Her creatures already crowd the night, and she gathers in those who walk in the sun as well as the shadows. Be wary.”

And with that, it seemed Nisha had no more to say—or rather, the being that used Nisha had said all that she wished. The spectral white of her feathers darkened, and she looked back up into the night. Maya found she had been holding her breath, and let out the air she had been holding in a long, shaken sigh.

The faint sound of something at her feet made her look down with a nervous jerk, but it was only Charan, and he showed no sign of wanting to add to Nisha’s warning. He pulled at her skirt and chirruped at her. She leaned down and gathered him up in her arms, feeling a little chilled.

It is more than time I got some sleep. Although her knees trembled for a moment and felt as if they might not hold her, she steadied herself with a hand to the tree trunk, then left the conservatory for the hall and the staircase.

She used the railing as support and climbed the stairs to her room. She had rounds of some of her patients in the hospital to make in the morning, and would need all her wits about her, with or without the interference of her unwelcome relations.

In the morning, she had managed to put Nisha’s words into the back of her mind. There was no point in dwelling on the warning, not when she had so much else to concern herself with. The patients she needed to attend today were not in Royal Free, but in St. Mary’s, and the atmosphere in St. Mary’s was distinctly cooler toward her and her few fellow female physicians than it was in the smaller hospital. She earned the right to install her own patients here by helping with the work in the charity wards, and every difficult charity case she took, as she saw it, was one more chip out of the edifice of Masculine Superiority.

Nevertheless, she was grateful that she had invited Amelia along and that Amelia’s classes permitted her to attend. The surprised glances, the knowing smirks they occasionally got as they worked their way down the wards were not so bad—but the glares of outright resentment and hostility were difficult to face down. It was good to have someone here who was prepared to render glare for glare.

It was hard work made harder by the fact that the other physicians gave her no help, and even pulled nurses away from helping her without so much as a “by your leave,” but Maya’s patients here needed her, and she would not leave them to the tender mercies of the less competent. These were working-class patients, mostly laborers, who had come to grief in work-related accidents. The moment they became injured, they ceased to earn their income, and the longer they remained out of work, the longer their families had to scrape by on nothing, or on the pittance that wives and those children old enough to work could bring in. She did what few other doctors would trouble themselves about; she brought cases to the attention of the parish and other charities, vouched for the men that they were genuinely injured and not attempting to collect money on false pretenses, and helped to steer them through the tangles of suspicion and doubt until they reached the other side with a little relief money to feed their families. She also did not wield the amputation saw with the vigor that other surgeons did. For a working man, that was more important than being helped to charity, for if appendages were amputated, he would find it hard to earn a living again, and if entire limbs were lopped off by someone who seemed to think humans as much in need of pruning as trees, it would be next to impossible to find employment.

Maya bent over one of these, Bill Joad, a tough, ugly man whose suspiciously glittering eyes had softened as soon as he saw her coming toward him down the ward.

“Well, Bill, I think another few days will be all you’ll need,” she said, removing the dressings and examining the hand he held out to her. “Bill, this is Amelia. She’s a student friend of mine that I want to show injuries like yours. I think she’ll be better than I am, one day.”

Amelia blushed. With his right hand imprisoned by Maya’s grip, Bill couldn’t touch his finger to his temple in salute, but he did offer a ghost of a smile. “I hain’t gonna say it’s a pleasure, Miss, ‘cause it hain’t—but I reckon if Doctor Maya ‘as ye in tow, ye’ll be comin’ on pretty well.”

Amelia bent over the swollen fingers with interest, noting the neat sutures along the sides. “What happened here, Bill?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before.”

“Eh, not likely ye would,” he replied. “Caught me ‘and in summat new. ‘S this machine, like a bloody great mangle.” His expression turned sour. “Coulda stopped it hearlier and saved me ‘and, but foreman wouldn’t let ‘em ‘till ‘e figured it was gonna jam ‘is works if ‘e let it go. Gonna see more o’ these, I reckon. Hain’t no room between them machines, an’ no way of keepin’ clear of ‘em if ye put a foot wrong. ‘S like that ev’rwhere now.”

“And no guards on the machines to keep you from getting caught foul and dragged into the works if you fall against one,” Maya added, her expression as sour as Bill Joad’s. “I don’t know what they’re making there—”

“Trimmin’s,” Bill broke in. “Fancy trimmin’s for dresses an’ bonnets an’ all. Laces an’ ribbons, Rooshes, an’ bows an’—oh, the wife’d know what-all, I don’t. Machine that got me’s fer cuttin’ an smoothin’ the ribbon, then winding ‘er all up on spool.”

“Makes me ashamed to put trimming on my dress!” Amelia burst out indignantly. Maya gave her a look of gratitude, but Bill shook his head.

“Not puttin’ on trimmins ‘ud just put us out o’ work,” he replied. “Tha’s not the way. Dunno what is, but tha’s not.” He did give Amelia one of his rare looks of gratitude, though. “Th’ butchers ‘ere ‘ud have took off me ‘and, but I ‘membered that me missus seen Doctor Maya at Fleet an’ sez she wuz a corker, so I ast fer ‘er. Man can’t work ‘thout a ‘and.”

“It wasn’t exactly a crushing injury, although it did break some of the bones of the fingers,” Maya went on, pointing out where she’d splinted the fingers with a care to the slashes she’d sutured. “It was the knives that cut the fabric into ribbons that did most of the damage; I sewed them up, but then made open, removable splints so I could keep an eye on the slashes—”

“And a very neat job of sewing, but better served in mending shirts and gowns for your betters,” said a loud voice behind them. Maya put Bill’s hand down carefully, then turned, slowly and deliberately, to face the speaker. She looked him up and down with calculated insolence.

A medical student—probably a surgeon in training, since they were the most arrogant of the lot—dressed as nattily as any West Ender on an outing, in his gray suit, waistcoat with a thick gold watch chain draped across the front, and impeccable linen.

“Thank you for the… compliment,” she replied, keeping her voice smooth and level, although Amelia seethed with resentment. “I don’t believe I caught your name; I thought it was considered appropriate for students to introduce themselves to surgeons before joining their rounds.”

“Perhaps. I shouldn’t think I’d be demanding that sort of ceremony if I were in your place,” the man replied, a sneer disfiguring an otherwise handsome face. “A half-breed mongrel bitch like you should consider herself lucky to be allowed inside these walls, much less permitted to practice as a doctor here.”

The words struck Maya like blows, and before she could recover from them, he turned on his heel and stalked away toward the entrance to the ward, between the rows of beds.

Anger made her flush hotly and tremble as she tried to hold it in; for a moment, she had no thought other than for her anger. Her palm itched to slap him; no, more than that, she wanted to run after him, jerk him around, and hit him.

Commotion next to her distracted her; she turned back to see Amelia holding Bill Joad down. “Lemme up!” he begged her, as she sat on his chest to keep him in his bed. “By gawd, I’ll fix ‘is face so’s ‘e sneers out t’ other side of ‘is mouth! Jes lemme up! No fancy-boy says that about th’ doctor! I’ll show ‘im ‘oo ‘e’s gotta beware of!”

That cooled her off, as if someone had dropped her into an icy pond, and she joined Amelia in remonstrating with the factory worker.

“Bill, you can’t do any such thing,” she replied, shaking his shoulders a little. “He’ll not only have you thrown out of the hospital, he might have you declared insane and chuck you into Bedlam, and then where would you be? You know no one ever leaves Bedlam!”

That threat was enough to quiet him, for Bill Joad had not survived this long without being well aware what the “toffs” could and could not do to a poor working man. He subsided, although his stormy expression left her with no doubt that if the man came within his reach again, Bill Joad would extract some form of revenge.

Maya released him and signed to Amelia to get off him before someone noticed. She leaned down and spoke to him, urgently, but quietly, words meant only for his ears. “Don’t do anything right now,” she urged. “Don’t do anything he can pin to you. It was only words, and words mean nothing. Not to you, and not to me.”

Bill snorted, and made a wry mouth. “Pull t’ other one. I seen yer face.”

“I’m here right now because I’m better than he is—whoever he is—and he knows it,” she told him fiercely. “Think about it! Why did you ask for me, insist on someone sending for me, instead of letting whoever was here at the time work on you?”

“ ‘Cause ev’ryone knows—” Bill Joad was not stupid; as the import of his own words dawned on him, his expression turned from angry and sullen to shrewd. “ ‘Cause ev’ryone at th’ Fleet, an’ ev’ryone what knows about th’ Fleet knows ‘bout you. ‘Get Doctor Maya,’ they sez. ‘She’ll save aught there’s t’ save.’ ”

“And?” she prompted.

“Won’t be long ‘fore them as got more’n we do finds out.” He nodded.

“Got it in one, Bill,” she replied. “Right now, all I have are cases like yours, but how long will it be before people with a great deal of money begin to notice how well my patients do? He’s jealous,” she continued, taking cold comfort in the fact. “Neither of us can afford to have someone like that for an enemy, Bill. Not now, anyway, and if important people do start to notice me, the important patients I take away from him will be revenge enough.”

Bill’s brow furrowed as he frowned. “Still. It hain’t right, Miss Maya. ‘E’s got no call t’ say things loik that, an’ some’un had oughta teach ‘im better manners.”

“Don’t let it be you—or at least, don’t let him find out it’s you behind it,” she said sternly. “There’s no justice for the poor man. Money buys justice, and I have no doubt there’s a great deal of money in that man’s pockets to buy the finest judge on the bench.”

“Should be,” said someone from the next bed with a bitter laugh, a man in an unusually clean and well-mended white nightshirt with a bandage over half of his face. “His uncle’s the head of this hospital. I should know; I worked for him as his secretary before one of his damned dogs tried to tear my face off.”

Maya traded startled looks with Bill, turned to stare back down the ward, along the way where the arrogant young man had gone, then turned back toward the stranger.

“If that’s the case, what are you doing here?” she asked carefully.

Another bitter laugh. “Because the dog attacked me on the master’s orders,” came the astonishing reply.